The fantasy of drafting women.

04Dec

The silver lining (of the failure of this ostensible change in policy) is that less men may end up wishing to kill and die overseas pointlessly for the Empire. But if ever any foreign army actually invades, men can still follow in the tradition of the jayhawkers and bushwhackers, pick up a rifle, and organize themselves without any government involvement.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced today that all combat roles will be opened to women, with no exceptions. This has lead to a reply from many conservatives that women should have been careful what they wished for, as now there is no longer any reason to exclude them from the draft.

I pointed out the delusion of the idea in the comments at Instapundit. The idea that women will ever be drafted into combat against their will is pure fantasy. All women who want to avoid being drafted need to do is fail the physical test. When they do, everyone will point out that women and men are different after all. Men in theory could also fail the physical tests, but in practice this will come with a stigma for men that women will never face.

Two other commenters at Instapundit described how this worked for men in the…

I was reading a while back that the actual number of women that want combat duty is extremely small. So the common error of creating broad policy around statistical outliers is also happening here. The other thing I found curious was that women couldn’t pass physical tests anyway. That’s curious to me because I think all of the girls in elite sports like gymnastics, tennis, skiing etc could pass all of the callisthenics-based/running based tests…all of them. But women have to work like pro athletes to achieve this. Now just because you may be a pissed off dyke doesn’t mean that you possess the athletic drive to come up to spec physically. Glaring at the enemy like Ronda Rousey doesn’t win on the battlefield. Masculine aggression and force does. After some body bags come home this fantasy will disappear.

I think the feminists have bitten off more than they can chew this time. If they keep failing the physicals in order to get discharged, it will soon become apparent that women are inferior to men. Whereas, if they pass these tests, they are likely to be sent to combat, where their poor performances will become even more glaring. Either way, they will be forced to advertise their inferiority to men. They have backed themselves into that narrow passage between the rock and a hard place. Glorious feminist progress indeed.

They have backed themselves into that narrow passage between the rock and a hard place. Glorious feminist progress indeed.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

What will eventually happen is that the men in combat units will revolt/mutiny and essentially drive the women out. Combat units WILL NOT tolerate weak links, even PC ones like women. Any combat soldier, of either sex, who can’t pull their own weight and puts their comrades in lethal danger WILL NOT be tolerated and WILL be weeded out – and there are a lot of creative and unpleasant ways in which to make that happen.

No, there is a limit to the stupidity that will be tolerated, even if the political repercussions are career-threatening (“hmmmmmm, let’s see … denied a promotion or killed by the neglect of someone who shouldn’t have been in combat in the first place … decisions, decisions…).

How long before the constitutionality of requiring only young men to register with Selective Service is challenged again? The last time it was challenged, the Supreme Court upheld it on the grounds that the purpose of the draft is to raise combat-ready forces, and women can’t be assigned to combat. Now that they can, what possible argument can there for limiting mandatory SS registration to men?